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Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler is a Vassar alum, class of 1990. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters as Senior Marketer for Corporate Counsel. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

This book was inevitable: after Waiter Rant (see my review at the end of this monthly roundup),
my colleagues in trade publishing were beating the bushes for more of
the same kind of thing -- semi-anonymous semi-memoirs from the fancier
end of the hospitality business, to tell us that our worst fears are not
just true but not even close to what's really happening.

Tomsky
has worked in fancy hotels -- mostly at the front desk, mostly in
midtown Manhattan -- for about a decade, and I detect a certain amount
of "but I really want to be a writer" in Heads in Beds, so
he's precisely the person those editors were searching for. He tells
his story -- a military brat who hit the end of his academic career in
New Orleans, with a useless philosophy degree and a burning desire to
make a lot of money without working too hard -- under the bizarre guise
of "Tommy Jacobs," whose story he tells in first person. (Surely he
realizes his real name is on the cover, so this serves no purpose?)

There are some juicy stories along the way, but not all that many of them -- Tomsky is telling his story (just like Waiter Rant did), and not itemizing all of the things that desk clerks and bellmen
and doormen and housekeepers get up to when you're not looking. He's not a
reporter; he's a memoirist, so all you can get is what he personally saw
and did and heard about. A more comprehensive book would be better -- juicier, obviously, but with a wider scope and a deeper sense of authority -- but that book would have required a publisher to bankroll a real reporter, send that person across the country to talk to a whole lot of hotel folk (and for that reporter to be good enough to get the real dirt), and then give time for the book to be synthesized and written. It's much easier to find someone who can write and just get him to tell his own story -- and that's close enough for a bestseller audience, anyway.

Don't get me wrong: Heads in Beds is entertaining, and lots of fun. It goes down easy, and the reader hopes that Tomsky has some stuff in reserve -- or some buddies he can hit up for stories -- to fill out the inevitable second volume.